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Biogeochemistry of Estuaries offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to understanding biogeochemical cycling in estuaries. Designed as a text for intermediate to advanced students, this book utilizes numerous illustrations and an extensive literature base to impart the current state-of-the-art knowledge in this field. While many of the existing books in estuarine science are comprised of edited volumes, typically focused on highly specific topics in estuaries,Biogeochemistry of Estuaries provides, for the first time, a unique foundation in the areas of geomorphology, geochemistry, biochemistry, aqueous chemistry, and ecology, while making strong linkages (trhoughout the text) to ecosystem-based processes in estuarine sciences. Estuaries, located at the interface between land and the coastal ocean are dynamic, highly productive systems that, in many cases, have been historically associated with development of many of the great centers of early human civilization. Consequentially, these systems have and continue to be highly impacted by anthropogenic inputs. This timely book takes the foundational basis of elemental cycling in estuarine and applies it to estuarine management issues. Biogeochemistry of Estuaries will be welcomed by estuarine/marine scientists, ecologists, biogeochemists, and environmentalists around the world.

With a complex assemblage of largely intact ecosystems that support the earth’s greatest diversity of life, the Amazon basin is a focal point of international scientific interest. And, as development and colonization schemes transform the landscape in increasing measure, scientists from around the world are directing attention to questions of regional and global significance. Some of these qustions are: What are the fluxes of greenhouse gases across the atmospheric interface of ecosystems? How mush carbon is stored in the biomass and soils of the basin? How are elements from the land transferred to the basin’s surface waters? What is the sum of elements transferred from land to ocean, and what is its marine “fate’? This book of original chapters by experts in chemical and biological oceanography, tropical agronomy and biology, and the atmospheric sciences will address these and other important questions, with the aim of synthesizing the current knowledge of biochemical processes operating within and between the various ecosystems in the Amazon basin.

This book is the first to detail the chemical changes that occur in deforming materials subjected to unequal compressions. While thermodynamics provides, at the macroscopic level, an excellent means of understanding and predicting the behavior of materials in equilibrium and non-equilibrium states, much less is understood about nonhydrostatic stress and interdiffusion at the chemical level. Little is known, for example, about the chemistry of a state resulting from a cylinder of deforming material being more strongly compressed along its length than radially, a state of non-equilibrium that remains no matter how ideal the cylinder’s condition in other respects. M. Brian Bayly here provides the outline of a comprehensive approach to gaining a simplified and unified understanding of such phenomena. The author’s perspective differs from those commonly found in the technical literature in that he emphasizes two little-used equations that allow for a description and clarification of viscous deformation at the chemical level. Written at a level that will be accessible to many non-specialists, this book requires only a fundamental understanding of elementary mathematics, the nonhydrostatic stress state, and chemical potential. Geochemists, petrologists, structural geologists, and materials scientists will find Chemical Change in Deforming Materials interesting and useful.

In 1936 a German chemist identified certain organic molecules that he had extracted from ancient rocks and oils as the fossil remains of chlorophyll--presumably from plants that had lived and died millions of years in the past. It was another twenty-five years before this insight was developed and the term "biomarker" coined to describe fossil molecules whose molecular structures could reveal the presence of otherwise elusive organisms and processes. Echoes of Life is the story of these molecules and how they are illuminating the history of the earth and its life. It is also the story of how a few maverick organic chemists and geologists defied the dictates of their disciplines and--at a time when the natural sciences were fragmenting into ever-more-specialized sub-disciplines--reunited chemistry, biology and geology in a common endeavor. The rare combination of rigorous science and literary style--woven into a historic narrative that moves naturally from the simple to the complex--make Echoes of Life a book to be read for pleasure and contemplation, as well as education.

Geochemical reaction modeling plays an increasingly vital role in several areas of geoscience, from environmental geochemistry and petroleum geology to the study of geothermal and hydrothermal fluids. This book provides an up-to-date overview of the use of numerical methods to model reaction processes in the Earth's crust and on its surface. Early chapters develop the theoretical foundations of the field, derive a set of governing equations, and show how numerical methods can be used to solve these equations. Other chapters discuss the distribution of species in natural waters; methods for computing activity coefficients in dilute solutions and in brines; the complexation of ions into mineral surfaces; the kinetics of precipitation and dissolution reactions; and the fractionation of stable isotopes. Later chapters provide a large number of fully worked calculation examples and case studies demonstrating the modeling techniques that can be applied to scientific and practical problems. Students in a variety of specialties from low-temperature geochemistry to groundwater hydrology will benefit from the wealth of information and practical applications this book has to offer.

Geology and Health is an integration of papers from geo-bio-chemical scientists on health issues of concern to humankind worldwide, demonstrating how the health and well-being of populations now and in the future can benefit through coordinated scientific efforts. International examples on dusts, coal, arsenic, fluorine, lead, mercury, and water borne chemicals, that lead to health effects are documented and explored. They were selected to illustrate how hazards and potential hazards may be from natural materials and processes and how anthropomorphic changes may have contributed to disease and debilitation instead of solutions. Introductory essays by the editors highlight some of the progress toward scientific integration that could be applied to other geographic sites and research efforts. A global purview and integration of earth and health sciences expertise could benefit the future of populations from many countries. Effective solutions to combat present and future hazards will arise when the full scope of human interactions with the total environment is appreciated by the wide range of people in positions to make important and probably expensive decisions. A case to illustrate the point of necessary crossover between Geology and Health was the drilling of shallow tube wells in Bangladesh to provide non-contaminated ground water. This "good" solution unfortunately mobilized arsenic from rocks into the aquifer and created an unforeseen or 'silent' hazard: arsenic. Geologists produce maps of earth materials and are concerned with natural processes in the environment with long time-frame horizons. The health effects encountered through changing the water source might have been avoided if the hydrological characteristics of the Bangladesh delta had been known and any chemical hazards had been investigated and documented. A recurrence of this type of oversight should be avoidable when responsible parties, often government officials, appreciate the necessity of such integrated efforts. The book extols the virtues of cooperation between the earth, life and health sciences, as the most practical approach to better public health worldwide.

The dynamic, evolving Earth, and the mathematical representation of its geochemical changes are the subject of this timely, helpful handbook. Global warming, changes in the ocean, and the effects of fossil fuel combustion are just a few of the phenomena that make the development of geochemical models critical. But what computational methods will help to accurately carry out this task? This new text teaches the methodology of computational simulation of environmental change. The author presents interesting applications of his methods to describe the response of the ocean and atmosphere to the infusion of pollutants, the effect of evaporation on seawater composition, climate change, and many other aspects of the Earth's evolving ecosystem. He also presents simple approaches for solving non-linear systems, calculating isotope ratios, and dealing with chains of identical reservoirs. With creative programs that can be executed on any personal computer, Walker offers earth scientists the techniques necessary to address the key problems in their field.

The term "carbon cycle" is normally thought to mean those processes that govern the present-day transfer of carbon between life, the atmosphere, and the oceans. This book describes another carbon cycle, one which operates over millions of years and involves the transfer of carbon between rocks and the combination of life, the atmosphere, and the oceans. The weathering of silicate and carbonate rocks and ancient sedimentary organic matter (including recent, large-scale human-induced burning of fossil fuels), the burial of organic matter and carbonate minerals in sediments, and volcanic degassing of carbon dioxide contribute to this cycle. In The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle, Robert Berner shows how carbon cycle models can be used to calculate levels of atmospheric CO2 and O2 over Phanerozoic time, the past 550 million years, and how results compare with independent methods. His analysis has implications for such disparate subjects as the evolution of land plants, the presence of giant ancient insects, the role of tectonics in paleoclimate, and the current debate over global warming and greenhouse gases

The discovery of isotopes is best understood in the context of the spectacular advances in physics and chemistry that transpired during the last 200 years. Around the year 1800, compounds and elements had been distinguished. About 39 elements were recognized, and discoveries of new elements were occurring rapidly. At about this time, the chemist John Dalton revived the ancient idea of the atom, a word derived from the Greek “atomos,” which literally means “indivisible.” According to Dalton's theory, all matter is made of atoms which are immutable and which cannot be further subdivided. Moreover, Dalton argued that all atoms of a given element are identical in all respects, including mass, but that atoms of different elements have different masses. Even today, Dalton's atomic theory would be accepted by a casual reader, yet later developments have shown that it is erroneous in almost every one of its key aspects. Nevertheless, Dalton's concept of the atom was a great advance, and, with it, he not only produced the first table of atomic weights, but also generated the concept that compounds comprise elements combined in definite proportions. His theory laid the groundwork for many other important advances in early nineteenth-century chemistry, including Avogadro's 1811 hypothesis that equal volumes of gas contain equal numbers of particles, and Prout's 1815 hypothesis that the atomic weights of the elements are integral multiples of the weight of hydrogen. By 1870, approximately 65 elements had been identified. In that year, Mendeleev codified much of the available chemical knowledge in his “periodic table,” which basically portrayed the relationships between the chemical properties of the elements and their atomic weights. The regularities that Mendeleev found directly lead to the discovery of several “new” elements—for example, Sc, Ga, Ge, and Hf—that filled vacancies in his table and confirmed his predictions of their chemical properties and atomic weights. Similarly, shortly after Rayleigh and Ramsay isolated Ar from air in 1894, the element He was isolated from uranium minerals in 1895; the elements Ne, Kr, and Xe were found in air in 1898; and Rn was discovered in 1900.

Crystals are sometimes called ‘Flowers of the Mineral Kingdom’. In addition to their great beauty, crystals and other textured materials are enormously useful in electronics, optics, acoustics and many other engineering applications. This richly illustrated text describes the underlying principles of crystal physics and chemistry, covering a wide range of topics and illustrating numerous applications in many fields of engineering using the most important materials today. Tensors, matrices, symmetry and structure-property relationships form the main subjects of the book. While tensors and matrices provide the mathematical framework for understanding anisotropy, on which the physical and chemical properties of crystals and textured materials often depend, atomistic arguments are also needed to quantify the property coefficients in various directions. The atomistic arguments are partly based on symmetry and partly on the basic physics and chemistry of materials. After introducing the point groups appropriate for single crystals, textured materials and ordered magnetic structures, the directional properties of many different materials are described: linear and nonlinear elasticity, piezoelectricity and electrostriction, magnetic phenomena, diffusion and other transport properties, and both primary and secondary ferroic behavior. With crystal optics (its roots in classical mineralogy) having become an important component of the information age, nonlinear optics is described along with the piexo-optics, magneto-optics, and analogous linear and nonlinear acoustic wave phenomena. Enantiomorphism, optical activity, and chemical anisotropy are discussed in the final chapters of the book.

This work is based on the observation that further major advances in geochemistry, particularly in understanding the rules that govern the ways in which elements come together to form minerals and rocks, will require the application of the theories of quantum mechanics. The book therefore outlines this theoretical background and discusses the models used to describe bonding in geochemical systems. It is the first book to describe and critically review the application of quantum mechanical theories to minerals and geochemical systems. The book consolidates valuable findings from chemistry and materials science as well as mineralogy and geochemistry, and the presentation has relevance to professionals in a wide range of disciplines. Experimental techniques are surveyed, but the emphasis is on applying theoretical tools to various groups of minerals: the oxides, silicates, carbonates, borates, and sulfides. Other topics dealt with in depth include structure, stereochemistry, bond strengths and stabilities of minerals, various physical properties, and the overall geochemical distribution of the elements.

This textbook and reference outlines the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, emphasizing applications in geochemistry. The work is distinguished by its comprehensive, balanced coverage and its rigorous presentation. The authors bring years of teaching experience to the work, and have attempted to particularly address those areas where other texts on the subject have provided inadequate coverage. A thorough review of the necessary mathematics is presented early on, both as a refresher for those with a background in university calculus, and for the benefit of those coming to the subject for the first time. The text is written for students in advanced undergraduate or graduate-level geochemistry as well as for all researchers in this field.